Dan Donnan

The Month of Games ends here with a big surprise. Having given up on a game would be pretty on brand for me, but I didn't give up on these - just did some scaling back. And, that's right, I said these. As in more than one. Introducing Filmsies , Gamesies , Showsies and Songsies , all playable right now in your browser.

It's now the third week of August, which means it's time for the third game in The Month of Games. If you have Tabletop Simulator on Steam, you will be able to use this . And if you don't, it is possible to play with other people in person as long as you have a deck of cards and follow the ruleset .

The Month of Games continues! As with last week's outing, you can play it now by downloading from itch , or you can get it from the Google Play store if you have an Android device.

The Month of Games officially begins - one game each week for all of August. You can play it now by downloading from itch , or you can get it from the Google Play store if you have an Android device.

Next week, the Month of Games begins. Almost every project is ready - two are uploaded and waiting for me to hit publish, one needs me to commit some changes (but not yet, otherwise it will break my test setup), and the fourth needs a couple of days to kick it over the finish line. It was so tempting on Wednesday night to just say fuck it and release what's ready, but that would spoil the whole idea. As for what happens after that, we shall see. I think I'm committed to something. But it's pretty clear by now that I will have probably changed my mind multiple times by the end of next month. Anyway, here is what I have learned over the past few months.

I've drafted all of the Month of Games posts, even though some of the games aren't finished yet, although one of them has quite a bit of background that I've decided to split out here because there's a lot that's happened. Long story short - I have abandoned quite a few projects.

While working on one of the games, I wrote some code that makes shadows super easy. So today I'm sharing that code. Quick Month of Games update: one of the games is done. It's uploaded and has been approved by Google, so let's hope I remember to hit publish.

The past few weeks I've not written about what I've doing, and that's because I've changed direction again. But I have a plan that I am trying to stick to, and it means there's lots of small projects that will be playable in the near future.

 As well as getting something running on mobile (as discussed last week), one of the things I've been looking into is getting a game working on the web.

I didn't have a plan for this week's post, so I was originally going to write about falling down internet rabbit holes and discovering that S Club 8's music was actually better than S Club 7's the entire time. Plus S Club 8 (much like their older counterpart) had their own TV show which starred Doc Brown from Back to the Future, and there was an American version of S Club 8 called American Juniors where one of the members was Lucy Hale from Pretty Little Liars. Also Gary Oldman's older sister plays Big Mo in EastEnders. That was a separate rabbit hole from the S Club stuff, but it still blew my mind.  I was going to go in depth on all of that, but you're just getting the main points because it's time to discover the pain in the arse that is deploying to mobile.

I have shelved Halloween Game. There we go. Shock over. I suppose I have to explain why.

I've wanted to do a game jam for a while, so seeing that the 50th Ludum Dare was happening earlier this month - and that it also marked the 20th anniversary of the event - I decided to take part.

Last month, I said that I wanted to have the game flow done  by the end of the first week of this month. Did I actually get it done?

I turned 30 this week. Hopefully. I write these in advance, so I'm actually still 29 while these words travel to my fingers to smash them into the keyboard. That's not because I don't want to write them in the same week, but if there is nothing lined up and I'm deep in making games, I don't want to have to take time out of making to write about making. But this week I'm not going to directly talk about the games, and instead reflect on the journey that got me here.

When writing about the dialogue system a few weeks ago, I mentioned that it was important to consider how translations would work at the beginning of the project. If every string has been hardcoded in English and there is now a demand to support a different language, then all of those strings need to be found, extracted and replaced with an ID before the translation can even begin. Depending on the size of the project, this can take weeks or even months to do it properly. So the best way to avoid that scenario is to setup the project as if it is going to be translated, even if it isn't.

If someone is looking down a corridor and sees another person move behind a wall, the moving person will disappear from view since they are now obscured by the wall. This is depth perception. In real life, depth, and vision in general, is based off light bouncing off objects before reaching the eyes. 3D games calculate this differently, but generally achieve the same effect. But what about 2D games?

When thinking about quitting my job to work on the football game, one of my concerns was money. I've got a mortage and bills to pay, and I need to buy food. So, where is the money going to come from? To begin with it was going to come from savings. I worked out that I had enough to keep me going for at least a year. But after that, then what?

Dialogue systems have been in games since the early days. While games like Pong didn't need dialogue, text based adventure games relied on it. That's also true of modern games - you won't find characters speaking to one another, or the player, in Mario Kart, but it is key in Dragon Age.

It's now been a month since I left the world of employment to work on making my own games. So, what progress have I made?

Just before I began working on Bird Game, I was lying in bed thinking about what I was going to work on now I'd ruled the football game out. It seemed like I was going to go and do a puzzle game, but then there are two ideas for games that would be ideal for releasing at Halloween, primarily because one is actually set then, and the other involves ghosts. So now I have to choose which of those I am going to do, because trying to develop multiple games at the same time doesn't seem like a good idea. Especially if both the ones I pick are the Halloween games because they will be releasing at the same time. But then a thought occurred.